Posted by pinotfan on 5/17/2015 3:41:00 PM (view original):
I must admit, including The Manifesto under fiction was a barb directed specifically at you,  Prof!

edit: I'd gladly pick up the gauntlet on Marx, but I don't want to hijack the thread ...

As for IP's rather selective thesis (or is it, antithesis?) I present not a book but an article, "The Absurdity of Karl Marx’s Dialectical Fundamentalism."

For books of fiction intended as such, I'd nominate:

• Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis (or the entire Space Trilogy of which it is a brief novel number two)
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (which could double as a sports book, for bettors on the 1919 World Series)

As for classics (of a sort) or non-fiction:

• Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
• The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And especially for ItalyProf, another excellent and insightful work of non-fiction:

• On Revolution, by Hannah Arendt

And as for truth beyond our non-fiction:

• The Bible, inspired by God's singular spirit and in various ways through various streams, written by numerous men

seamar...you are the first person I have known that knew about Replay. very few people have heard of it...to midge..it is a sci -fi fantasy time travel story and in my opinion the best time travel yarn ever written..too good to be a movie.

dino...I am going to have to re-read it...it's been a while. Always a sucker for a good time-travel story. Have you read The Time-Traveler's Wife?

Harry Turtledove also has some interesting ones. Check out the short story collection Counting Up, Counting Down. He has two stories that are connected in an interesting way.

I have time travelers wife...I havnt read it yet...I have to find the time....is harry turtledove an alternate history writer ?
a great movie/book recommendation - time after time.....h.g wells travels to the future to catch jack the ripper who escaped in his time machine...early mary Steenburgen.

The main purpose of this tournament is so we readers can find out about some good books that maybe we haven't heard of before.

That being said.....keep those nominations coming!

"Throw the Long Bomb" by Jack Laflin with a forward by Bart Starr

Posted by dino27 on 5/25/2015 10:50:00 AM (view original):
I have time travelers wife...I havnt read it yet...I have to find the time....is harry turtledove an alternate history writer ?
a great movie/book recommendation - time after time.....h.g wells travels to the future to catch jack the ripper who escaped in his time machine...early mary Steenburgen.

Yes, Turtledove is a prolific alt history/fantasy/sci fi writer. I've read quite a few of his books. The short story collections are a good place to start before jumping in.

i was in barnes and noble..they didnt have any of his short story collections....ill see whjat i can order.

Posted by dino27 on 5/26/2015 5:14:00 PM (view original):
i was in barnes and noble..they didnt have any of his short story collections....ill see whjat i can order.

Counting Up, Counting Down  is a good place to start.

We need more nominations.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Not sure if it would qualify as a Classic or just Fiction.

Posted by Midge on 5/30/2015 2:17:00 PM (view original):
We need more nominations.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods - Fiction

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy - nonfiction

David Noble, America by Design, and David Noble, Death of a Nation - nonfiction

Aeschylus, The Orestia Trilogy - Classic (greatest single work ever written IMHO)

Lao Tze, The Tao te Ching - Classic (by some estimates, the most translated book in world history - I have no idea who counts these things)

W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (the greatest nonfiction book ever written in the USA) - nonfiction AND Classic

Karl Polani, The Great Transformation - nonfiction 

Jawarhalal Nehru, Glimses of World History - classic nonfiction

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 Volumes - classic (see chapter 32 of Vol. 1 if you read no other part of it - where Marx explains that free competition leads to winners who become bigger, concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands, leading to greater inequality, until society rebels at the extreme concentration and monopoly of wealth and power in so few hands).

Immanuel Kant, On Perpetual Peace - classic

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century - nonfiction

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (great book, but compared with Arrighi - see above - it is like the Cliff Notes version) - nonfiction

Edward Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - classic

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations - classic (and read the whole book, it don't say what you have been told it says, or rather it has more to say than just that).

Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (sequel to "The Long Twentieth Century but can be read on its own, and explains why "Wealth of Nations" doesn't exactly say what you think it does) - nonfiction

Everything by Shakespeare, but especially: read Hamlet first, and  THEN King Lear to see how first Cordelia is a further development of what is lacking in Hamlet,
and then how Edgar is the solution to the problem that Hamlet personifies - namely who is capable of leading society and governing in the new modern age)- classic

Ursula LeGuin, The Earthsea "Trilogy" - now five books last I counted - in my book, second only to the Lord of the Rings as a fantasy literary world - fiction

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation - long series, I can't even remember how many books, on the destiny of a galactic empire and its successor system. fiction

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - fiction, going on classic

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - nonfiction, going on classic

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx's classic explanation of why neither economic or any other determinism of large-scale forces, nor an over-emphasis on individual personalities as in the "Great Man" school of history, can adequately explain historical events).

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, or the abridged versions often titled "On the Paris Commune"  (Marx's clearest writing on direct democracy and clearest demonstration that he opposed dictatorship in all forms). 

Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization - I apologize if I have already listed this - 3 volumes, titled "The Structure of Everyday Life", "The Wheels of Commerce", and "The Perspective of the World" - beautiful volumes full of pictures, a magnificent work on how over 3 centuries the rise of capitalism changed the world's economic life. Might be the greatest work of history ever written  -  nonfiction, going on classic.

Plato, Protagoras - not as well known as "The Republic" and some other dialogues, but the only one where an advocate of democracy - Protagoras, gets to to say his peace and in my book Protagoras kicks Socrates' elitist-technocratic butt in the debate - classic.

Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar - amazing and very readable book, demonstrating that contrary to the usual interpretation, Caesar was killed for advocating democratic reforms as demanded by the common people in the ferocious class wars in ancient Rome over debt and redistribution of wealth, and his killers were only the latest in a long line of upper class death squads that had already murdered other democratic reformers wanting redistribution and debt relief like the Gracchi brothers and others) - nonfiction

William Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe - Hitchcock is more conservative in his interpretation of various events than I am, but it is one of the best written books of any kind I have ever written, hard to put down even when you know what happened next, a history of Europe from WWII to the founding of the EU - nonfiction

Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto - a great book by a good friend - nonfiction, just read it, impossible to summarize.

Julie Wark, the Human Rights Manifesto - a very, very important book for today - nonfiction

L. Randall Wray, Modern Money Theory - will explain why all of today's monetary policies are wrong, and what could be done instead - nonfiction

John McDermott, Corporate Society   AND Economics in Real Time - nonfiction

Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire - I have my criticisms, but this is an important work on the new political world of globalization - nonfiction

Lewis Mumford, The City in History, Technics and Civilization, and The Condition of Man - the most independent thinker I know, his works are all great - nonfiction

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism - Arendt is an opponent, and I recently published a stinging critique of her thought. But she is the best opponent I know and always asked the right questions, one of the truly great thinkers of the 20th Century- if anyone wants a copy of my article criticizing her work, write me a asitemail with your email address and I will send it by email - nonfiction, going on classic

Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space - an amazingly insightful book about how our world today does not understand itself because it relies on myths that were shaped for other historical times and places, and where we might look for the elements to construct a way of understanding ourselves. - nonfiction

Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God - a masterpiece in four volumes. I don't care that much for his more famous "Hero with a Thousand Faces" as the "monomyth" has had some negative results when applied to cultural products, including the Star Wars Prequels ! But Masks of God is a fantastic series of studies of how different kinds of human societies understood the world around them and themselves. nonfiction

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass - still our greatest American poet - fiction? Poetry? Classic

Allen Ginsburg, Howl and Other Poems - maybe the greatest poem of the 20th Century - poetry, classic

Greil Marcus, Mystery Train - a book that changed my life in many ways, best book ever on Rock n' Roll I think. nonfiction.

Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan and the Basement Tapes - as good a book on what America is and is about as I know, exception the DuBois book listed above. - nonfiction

Dante, The Divine Comedy (Italians would never forgive me if I left this out) - classic

Wendell Berry, almost anything, but start with his classic "the Unsettling of America" - our Emerson - a Kentucky farmer, essayist, novelist, poet, activist, maybe the greatest living American - classic, nonfiction, fiction and poetry.

Left out one great, great work: 

Eduardo Galeano (just died a few weeks ago), Memory of Fire - 3 volumes. The whole history of Latin America and the Caribbean in one-two page vignettes, written as short epic poems almost. A masterpiece, one of the greatest books of any kind I have ever read. nonfiction written as though it were fiction, near-classic.